Monday, October 17. 2016

Call for External Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
To Resign in Protest Against Assaults on Democracy by the Hungarian Government

In Hungary today democracy is under a dark cloud that is seriously threatening freedom of expression, human rights and even the rule of law. As External Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), we are witnessing with alarm and dismay the relentless and unchecked deterioration of social freedom and justice under Hungary’s current government. We feel that the Academy has the responsibility and the historical duty to raise its voice in defense of freedom and justice in Hungary. Failure to do so would be to miss its higher calling.

"that the Academy [should] initiate substantive discussion as soon as possible about the anti-democratic developments in Hungary, especially freedom of the press, and that the Academy should take part in the exploration of issues important for the whole of society”

We extend here a general call for External Members of the Academy to join us in resigning in protest against the Orban regime and its repressive policies. This call is addressed only to External Members, not to Internal Members, who might otherwise risk a fate comparable to that of the staff of Hungary’s largest independent newspaper, Népszabadság, often critical of the government, whose operation was abruptly terminated without warning or justification on October 8th 2016.

This open manifesto and all updates will appear online at the Hungarian Free Press website. External Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences are invited to resign by sending an explicit letter of resignation by email to the President of the Academy:

Once your identity and intention to resign have been confirmed, your name will be added to the list below.

(For those who would like to consult a comprehensive, detailed legal analysis of the Orban regime’s depredations from 2010 until May 2016, many expert reports are available at http://bit.ly/HungaryReports.)

External Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who have resigned to protest the Hungarian Government's Assaults on Democracy in Hungary:

Saturday, October 15. 2016

Open Letter to Professor László Lovász, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

[hyperlinks added, not in original letter]

14 October, 2016

Dear Professor Lovász,

We, the undersigned members and doctors of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences [HAS], representing a variety of world-views and academic interests, hereby wish to express our concern about the antidemocratic processes that have been taking place in Hungary in the last few years, especially the threat to freedom of the press. We consider it highly damaging to amend Hungary’s constitution to diminish the role of checks and balances that is normal in democratic states and to exploit the refugee crisis to arouse xenophobia.

In addition to the deep crisis in education, research and the health system, we are particularly troubled about the nationalization of the public media and their use as government mouthpieces, along with the liquidation of the existing independent press, as in the restructuring of Origo, and, in the last few days, the closure of Népszabadság.

We consider it important that, as a prominent embodiment and forum of our nation’s intellectual sphere, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences should be playing an investigative role as well as implementing substantive debate about these matters of concern for the whole of society. Our concerns are particularly reinforced by the letters that have been sent to the President of the Academy by external and honorary members in the last few days. The significance of the issues raised is underscored by the fact that these respected scholars, concerned for Hungary’s future, have elected to resign as members to protest the inaction on the part of our Academy.

We hence respectfully request that the President see to it as soon as possible that the leadership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences initiates discussion toward committing itself to launching scholarly investigations as well as conducting debates concerning these urgent issues facing Hungarian society.

As our letter concerns important matters of public interest, we are simultaneously making it public.

Thursday, October 6. 2016

“I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us…. I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library.. and its [peer review] expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the [subscription cancelation] savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!” (Harnad, 20th century)

Richard Poynder notes that 17 years on, Institutional Repositories (IRs) are still half-empty of their target content: peer-reviewed research journal articles.

He is right. Most researchers are still not doing the requisite keystrokes to deposit their peer-reviewed papers (and their frantic librarians' efforts are no substitute).

The reason is that researchers' institutions and funders still have not got their heads around the right deposit mandates.

They will, but they will not get historic credit for having done it as soon as they could have.

Not so (see the "denominator fallacy"). In percentage terms those central Quasitories are doing just as badly as IRs. But their visible recruiting efforts (software that keeps reminding and cajoling authors) is clever, and something along the same lines should be adopted as part of funder and especially institutional deposit mandates. (Keystrokes are keystrokes, whether done for one's own institutional repository or a third party Quasitory.)

The biggest Quasitory of all is the Virtual Quasitory called Google Scholar (GS). GS has mooted most of the fuss about interoperability because it full-text-inverts all content. It's a nuclear weapon, but it is in no hurry. Unlike institutions and funders, GS is under no financial pressure. And unlike publishers, it does not have the ambition or the need to capture and preserve publishers' obsolete, parasitic functions (even though, unlike publishers, GS is in an incomparably better position to maximise functionality on the web). GS is waiting patiently for the research community to get its act together.

Institutions and funders are not just sluggish in adopting and optimizing their deposit mandates but they are making Faustian Little Deals with their parasites, prolonging their longstanding dysfunctional bondage.

Can't blame publishers for striving at all costs to keep making a buck, even if they no longer really have any essential product, service or expertise to offer (other than funding the management of peer review). Publishers' last resort for clinging to their empty empire is the OA embargo -- for which the antidote -- the eprint-request button (the IR's functional equivalent of Academia.edu and ResearchGate) -- is already known; it's just waiting to be used, along with effective deposit mandates.

As to why it's all taking so excruciatingly long: I'm no good at sussing that out, and besides, Alma Swan has forbidden me even to give voice to my suspicion, beyond perhaps the first of its nine letters: S.

The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.

The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)